Monday, January 3, 2011

Romantically Apocalyptic: a webcomic about staving off post-nuclear boredom

I've seen this story before when I was perusing Vitaly Alexius artwork. But there wasn't quite as many pages to the story.

Via:Sometimes the best way to survive the end of the world is just to go crazy and roll with it. After all, the denizens of the lushly painted webcomic Romantically Apocalyptic survive with gas masks, ingenuity, and batshit insanity.

Vitaly S Alexius illustrates Romantically Apocalyptic using a combination of live actors, stock footage, green screens, and Photoshop. The result is a beautiful bit of disaster porn, with crumbling buildings and piles of human skeletons.

A nuclear holocaust has destroyed most of humanity, leaving behind just a handful of soldiers: the Captain (the looniest of the loony), his Pilot, his Sniper, and his Engineer. Well, there are also a group of cultists living underground, but they worship a shredded lemonade label and hardly count. Instead of looking for other survivors or trying to rebuild some semblance of civilization, the crew occupies their time meandering through a ruined city making their own fun. Their own very peculiar brand of fun.

The crew, especially the Captain, often halfway pretend the apocalypse hasn't happened. They still go to the movies and try to drive cars and order from McDonald's. But there are dangers in this newly destroyed world. Forget the slow death from lingering radiation, these guys deal with flesh-hungry atomic monsters and alien abductions.

It's the Captain's relentless disconnection from reality that helps him survive these close encounters, but during the less violent downtimes, he can wear on his fellow survivors' nerves. In fact, the greatest threat in the nuclear post-apocalypse may be one man's inanity.